Wisdom index poll puts Labour eight points ahead of Conservatives

A new poll has shown Labour with an eight-point lead over the Conservative
Party. Here ICM's Martin Boon explains how the Wisdom Index works.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown, during the final live leaders' election debate in the Great Hall of Birmingham University in 2010Photo: PA

By Martin Boon

9:00PM BST 02 Jun 2012

"Be yourself," many a parent will have told their offspring. "Don't just follow the crowd." Sound advice in the main, but what if the crowd is right? In many cases, its views are ignored at your peril.

ICM's new method for predicting what will happen at the next General Election depends on this view – first put forward by James Surowiecki in his 2004 book "The Wisdom of Crowds".

As long as a crowd complies with a small number of simple principles it will show greater decision-making wisdom as a group than the smartest individuals within it.

Conventional polling asks people how they would vote if there was a general election tomorrow.

The Sunday Telegraph/ICM Wisdom Index asks, instead, what they think the result of the next election will be – in terms of the share of the vote obtained by each of the main parties.

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The system has performed well in extensive road-testing. In our final poll before the 2010 General Election among a random sample of just over 2,000 people across Britain, ICM added a few questions asking people what they thought the result of next day's actual election would be.

We were surprised to find that the collective judgment of the crowd outperformed our own 'classic' opinion poll methodology, which itself still produced the most accurate prediction of the election, according to the British Polling Council's evaluation.

Still, it was an outcome that was both surprising and intriguing.

Opinion polls have had a pretty decent record in the UK over the last 20 years, but are not perfect and all pollsters constantly look at methods with one eye on finding the holy grail that will help give them a shot at the prestigious "most accurate" mantle next time around.

Out of this context is borne the Sunday Telegraph/ICM Wisdom Index, a tracker survey that will operate alongside traditional polls in producing a 'prediction' of what will happen at the next General Election, but which gets there via a very different route.

The Wisdom Index is being viewed as an exciting and innovative contribution to opinion polling and market research in general.

Instead of focusing like classic polls do on how each individual will themselves behave (i.e. vote), we will ask our questions on what share of the vote they think each of the main parties will get.

Then, we'll simply average up the guesses and produce an average vote share for each party. Simple stuff, but hopefully the stuff of which wisdom is made.